Test if the user is root
When Perl is executing a program, it maintains the user id of the process owner in a global variable ($<). When a Perl program is executed by root or a user with root privileges (e.g. using the sudo command), the user id variable is always set to zero. This can be checked at the command line:
$ perl -e 'print $< . \n;'
1000
$ sudo perl -e 'print $< . \n;'
0
Because the root user id is always zero and in Perl zero is treated as false, it is a trivial task to test if the user is root during runtime. This can be used to for flow control, such as exiting the program early:
use Carp qw/croak/;
if ($<) {
croak "Error: exiting program as not executed by root\n";
}
In Windows the user id variable is always set to zero and is of limited use. However the Perl Win32 module has the Win32::IsAdminUser() method that can be used instead of $<, like this:
use Win32;
use Carp qw/croak/;
if (not Win32::IsAdminUser()) {
croak "Error: exiting program as not executed by root\n";
}
This article was originally posted on PerlTricks.com.
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David Farrell
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